deletia.co.uk

So I’m leaving for the airport in just under an hour. I fly to London and then catch my flight to Delhi, arriving there tomorrow morning. The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a blur and I still don’t feel like I’m leaving - I’ll probably wake up in India expecting to get up and ready for work.

My bag is finally packed (I hate packing above all else!) and is way heavier than I would like but I can’t find anything to cut down to make it lighter. Most of the weight is coming from random ’stuff’ rather than clothes or toiletries or anything that I could reduce. Oh well I guess I can get rid of things along the way if I’m struggling. At least my backpack is pretty comfortable, despite the weight (thanks chris!).

I don’t have too much else to say for now… I’ll see if inspiration comes to me while I’m killing time in Heathrow, otherwise it’ll be next stop - Delhi!

I’m writing this from my shiny new laptop bought specially for my travels. It is cute and light and very very dinky. After contemplating for quite some time which would be the best to buy (which I discuss in some depth over here), I decided in the end to go for the acer aspire one in the 8GB SSD version. I also got another 8GB SD card and I’ll probably be buying a USB card or two for extra storage. It went against my instincts somewhat to buy a computer with only 8GB storage space in these days of terabytes of data (especially when the 120GB HDD version was only £20 more) but after realising how much lighter and hard wearing it would be without a HDD and the fact that I have hundreds of GB of available storage space in various places online I decided the future is solid state. Interestingly I was sorting through some old documents while packing up house and found details of the first laptop I got in about 1997 - it came with a 2.1GB HDD for the bargain price of £1400. My new toy was £230 including the extra memory card… way to beat inflation! I also had one of the first mp3 players which cost about £300 and held about 7 songs - isn’t technology great? Anyway, I digress… Overall I’m very pleased with it. It’s a perfect size, light and fast and it even has an integral webcam so I can take photos of myself typing in front of tropical sunsets. It’s taking a little while to get used to the keyboard but luckily I have small fingers. And I might have to do something about the linux for dummies OS.

So apart from getting a new laptop, I have had my last set of vaccinations, handed in my notice at work (less traumatic than I thought it would be), and bought my ticket down to London. The majority of stuff I want to keep is packed in boxes and I’m getting ready to move out in a couple of weeks.

It was my birthday on Sunday. I am 28. In 8 weeks I will be in India. I’m hoping by my next birthday I will be somewhere more exciting than Newcastle. I’m hoping by my 30th birthday I’ll be glad I went on this trip rather than hanging around the same town I grew up in all my life, waiting for something to happen.

Tick tock tick tock… less than 10 weeks to go. Meeep! I’ll be in single figures soon. How utterly terrifying.

I have had my second set of jabs, given notice on the house, 4 and a bit weeks until I move, taking the kitties to their new home in 5 weeks, hand in my notice at work either this week or next. Tick tick tick…

I am looking forward to having my life packed up into a few neat boxes, having got rid of nearly 28 years of accumulated junk. I am sick to the back teeth of ebaying but the money is still coming in dribs and drabs so I suppose I can’t complain. I swear I am never going to buy so much stuff again. Stuff hidden away in boxes under the bed and overflowing from cupboards - why have I been carting it round with me from house to house for so many years? I just want to throw it all in a big skip and be done with it.

At least I have paid my last rent cheque for a while so the game for the next month and a half will be to see how little I can spend of my last pay in my full-time job. Argh. No wonder I keep asking myself “what the hell are you doing?”

I think I have been neglecting my blogging duties somewhat…

In any case, I do have some updates. My India visa arrived and it is beautiful! That is a big weight off my mind as I was convinced my passport was going to go missing or some other terrible scenario and now that it’s arrived safe and sound, complete with visa, I’ve stopped dreaming about missing flights every night. I was going to send off for my Nepal visa next but don’t think I can take the stress again so I think I’m just going to get it at the border.

Money making has slowed somewhat. It is hard work coming home every night after a full day at work and going back on the computer to work more, whether it is ebaying or whatever. I’ve been a little lazy in the last week or 2 but time seems to be flying past even faster than ever now so I really need to get rid of belongings and make more money! I was rejected by AQA which I was absolutely gutted about. I made so sure that there were no mistakes in my test and I was pretty confident about passing. They don’t tell you why you didn’t get through either and I’m not allowed to apply for another 6 months so I may as well forget about that until I get to New Zealand. The other online job I applied for have filled all the vacancies for english speaking applicants, so basically the work online trail has dried up now. I’m just going to have to put all my efforts into working on my websites but it’s frustrating when they’re not bringing in any cash.

Just under 12 weeks until I leave now. I’ll be moving out of my house and over to my mum’s in about a month. Handing in my notice at work sometime before that, which I am not looking forward to! I need to make a list this weekend of everything I need to sort out and timescales for doing it all in. Plus maybe start packing up some books and things ready for the move.

Vaccinations wise, I have had my first two shots of Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies, at a cost of £86 (ouch). Another two of those to go. No wonder I’m feeling miserable about my lack of extra income…

I am writing this mainly for the benefit of my family as my birthday is coming up and they have started asking me what I want. As I am selling everything in sight that won’t be useful on my trip (except my books), I thought I’d put together this list of ‘nice to have’ items for my packing list.

• A nice day bag. I have one but it’s only 10 litres and it’s rather too small. I’m thinking something around 25 litres would be more practical.
• A maglite (purple, obviously)
• A pen knife
• Mosquito net
• some kind of waterproof thing to keep my money in when i go swimming because i don’t trust hotel safes
• rucksack protector because british airways destroyed my last rucksack. one that looks like a bag, not one of those weird metal cage things
• travel washing line like this one
• money for clothes and bits and pieces i want to pick myself

hmm I can’t think of anything else…

Last night was the first time since I started planning this trip that I got a little freaked out. I think this was somehow related to the night before when I’d had a dream that I’d landed in India (which conveniently looked exactly like Whitley Bay, ha!), my airport transfer refused to take me away from the airport and everything was going wrong. And also the fact that I looked at my calendar last night and realised I leave in just over 3 months. 3 months? Argh.

3 months to save as much money as I physically can; 3 months to get all my visas, sort all my vaccinations, get my travel insurance; 3 months to research all the places I want to go to, look for places to stay, have a rough idea of what I want to do when I get there.

I used to be a big worrier - I used to lie in bed late at night, worrying about all the things on my mind and not sleeping. I seem to have forced myself out of that habit in recent years and I generally don’t get worried about things just by not thinking about them. I’m not a planner and I’ve found this has worked to my advantage when it comes to travel as the more I research, the more excited I get but also start thinking about al the things that could go wrong.

And then last night, late at night, I didn’t sleep - I lay in bed thinking: “What if I get lost and don’t meet up with my intrepid group in India?”, “What if my backpack doesn’t arrive in the airport?”, “What if I don’t meet anyone I like?”, “What if I get homesick and lonely?”, “What if I hate it and just want to come home?”, “What if I can’t find a job in New Zealand?”, “What if I run out of money?” and so on and so on - you get the picture.

I’m taking it to mean that I’m either doing too much planning or not enough. I’m leaning towards the latter as everyone keeps saying “Oooh, so have you got everything organised now then?”. And on that note, I’m off to apply for my Indian visa.

As time ticks on, I am working harder and harder to try and save as much as I can for my trip so I can survive for as long as possible without the comfort of a nice monthly paycheck.

Mainly I have been trying to spend as little as possible (although there is still work to be done on the lunches and bus fares front) and selling things on Ebay and Amazon. This acomplishes 2 things at once as I am getting rid of items that would otherwise have to go into storage when I leave (who knew I had so much crap lying around?) and also bringing in some well needed cash.

Since mid June I have transferred £775.39 into my bank account from ebay and amazon sales. However, I have also spent £77.34 on fees and packing materials (amazon fees not included as they are taken out of your incoming funds before you can transfer them) and a whopping £197.50 on postage. Bet Royal mail love me! This comes out at just over £500 profit for this time period. Not bad for a month’s work!

There’s no way I will be brining in this much over subsequent months as I’ve already sold pretty much all of my ‘high earning’ items but i will be continuing to squeeze as much income I can from belongings which I no longer need before I go.

I’ve also been doing little bits and pieces here and there to bring in a few extras. It’s never going to make me rich, but every penny counts!

• I rejoined rpoints, which I’ve not really been active on since about this time last year (and I’ve lost my VIP status in the meantime, oh no!). I’ve made nearly £250 on this in total and while this is spread over a fairly long time period, if I’d saved all that up it would buy me a laptop (or a set of vaccinations, grr) so it’s not to be sniffed at!
• I applied for AQA and Texperts, both of which pay you to answer random questions that come in via text message. Neither of them are recruiting at the moment but i’m really hoping some positions will open up before I leave because I am the queen of internet research!
• I have also signed up with slicethepie. They pay you to review music and while again, it’s not going to make you rich, I’ve made £10 in the last week and trust me that is good for these type of sites!
• I installed google ads on this blog. doubt it will make me much money, but it’s worth a try!

I have a lot more to say about making and saving money for a trip (or any other reason for that matter) but I’ve decided to set up another website for these more ‘article style’ posts as I just keep thinking of more and more things I want to write about! This website is at www.travelswithmylaptop.com - there’s nothing there at the moment but there should be by the end of this weekend when I’ve had a chance to work on it. I’m also going to be working on another site which has been in the pipeline for quite a while. More news on that soon!

Think that’s quite enough for now anyway, must get back to making some money!

So on Monday I toddled along to my local GP to get my recommended vaccinations for the places I’ll be visiting and ‘medical advice’. Turned out to be rather a waste of time as the website the nurse was using to ‘advise’ me had gone down. What is the point of me taking time off work to go to the doctors when all they’re going to do is read out bits from a website? Surely I could do that myself. Anyway I was asked to make another appointment (hopefully the website will be working next time?!) and at least I insisted on getting the Hepatitis A booster there and then so it didn’t feel like a total waste of my time…

Turns out I already had all the free vaccinations I could get when I went to Thailand last year. All the others now recommended to me are not available on the NHS and therefore shockingly expensive:

• Hepatitits B - around £40 per dose and 3 doses needed over 6 months for a total price of £120. I have decided not to bother with this one in the hopes that I will not need medical attention involving dirty needles…
• Rabies - around £45 a dose and again, 3 doses needed but over the space of 1 month, resulting in a total price of around £135. I am lothe to pay for this as it sounds a bit pointless anyway - apparently if you are bitten by a suspect animal you need to go and get more injections anyway. However the vaccination gives you a few days to get to a hospital, whereas without it you have 24 hours. As I will be trekking in remote parts of Nepal (and possibly Tibet) which are known for packs of wild dogs, the sensible option would be to get the vaccination. Oh but the money! it hurts me!
• Japanese Encephalitis - around £45 a dose with the 3 doses needed over a month costing around £135 (why am i starting to get the feeling they split these into multiple injections just to charge you more?). Apparently this is fairly rare and usually only a risk if you’re going to be around animals/staying on farmland. Sounds like another candidate for just not bothering hmm? However it’s recommended to people staying in Asia for longer than a month and god knows what I’ll be doing and where I’ll be staying when I’m traipsing around SE Asia. Also if you contract this, there’s a good chance you’ll either die or get brain damage. Oh and there’s no treatment.

So yeah. If I were to get all these vaccinations, it would cost me somewhere close to £400. And I’m probably going to get the second 2 as I’ve now spent so long thinking about it, I’m starting to think it’s tempting fate if I don’t get them. Makes me wonder why I’m giving away half my paycheck in taxes every month when I’m never even ill..

Then there’s the issue of Malaria tablets. I was really not keen on taking these as nearly everyone I know has had a bad reaction from them. However I also don’t want to get malaria so… The nurse recommended me Malarone, which I found out after I got home and did a bit of research, costs around £2.50 a tablet. One tablet per day for 2-3 months in asia = a lot of money. Are these people on commission or something?? So I have decided to go with the much cheaper doxycycline, coming in at around 15p per tablet. Much better! However this has the most common side effect of making your skin more sensitive to sunlight. I swear someone up there is laughing at me.

So anyway, my last resort for now is to see if it’s a case of ‘who you know’ and my tenuous connections can get me some vaguely cheaper vaccinations. Otherwise I guess I’m just going to have to suck it up and pay (oh but that money would buy me a lovely sub-notebook computer!). Well either that or risk dying horribly - whatever!

When I first started thinking about this trip I planned on bringing a laptop, and then the more advice on travel blogs I read, the more I was put off. It’s true, laptops take up precious space and weight in your backpack, you have to carry them around with you everywhere or live with the fear of someone stealing it if you decide to take the risk of leaving it in your room.

But then you have the advantages of being able to back up your photos, not have to rely on the ancient pcs, buggy software and keyboards that refuse to type what you want in internet cafes, watch a film on the plane or when you’re culturally overloaded and just want to stay in your room…

I’d really like to keep freelancing while I’m on the road and while this is probably possible in internet cafes, it would definitely be a lot easier to work from my own laptop. And then I discovered the Asus Eee PC. I first saw these in the airport on the way out to Japan and they were so tiny and light (and in a range of cute colours!), I was tempted to get one there and then. Of course the screen resolution is pretty low and they only come with a small amount of disk space but for around £200 and weighing less than 1kg, who cares?

I am very very very tempted but I’m scrimping and saving as much as I can at the moment and still not sure if the hassle of bringing a laptop (even a teeny tiny light one) is worth it… So I think my plan will be to wait until my trip is imminent, hope the price for the better models comes down a bit, see how much money I’ve managed to save and if I can spare any of it to buy toys when it would cover my living expenses for a month in Asia. Oh, but I want one!

money money money… on that note I’d better get back to my ebaying and freelancing

Earlier this week I bought my ticket - I am finally out of here! I probably started seriously thinking about this trip about a year ago. After breaking up with my boyfriend in 2006, I moved into my own flat and lived alone for the first time ever. After a couple of months I realised how much I actually loved living alone and doing my own thing and so I started travelling to all the places I’d always wanted to go.

• I went to China on a trip with work, ate the most amazing food I’d ever tasted and was horrified by the toilets.
• I travelled to Iceland with my brother where we saw beautiful waterfalls, hiked to the top of mountains to look down on vast glaciers and sampled the famous Reykjavik pub crawl.
• I took a short trip to Copenhagen just before xmas with one of my friends and escaped from the commercialised mess that xmas in the uk has become to the gorgeous European christmas markets.
• I went to Thailand, visited my friend living in Bangkok and spent a glorious couple of weeks exploring Chiang Mai and wandering around tropical beaches. This trip was the turning point for me in that i realised that I actually could travel by myself without getting lost, lonely or kidnapped. And I loved it.
• I returned to one of my favourite countries - Norway, for a weekend break in the capital
• I fulfiled one of my long term ambitions by travelling to Havana, Cuba with my friends. I fell in love with Cuba more than I ever thought I would and would recommend it to anyone (as long as you stay well away from the tacky resorts).
• I introduced my mum to asia on a trip to Hong Kong where we watched the New Year fireworks over the famous skyline
• I went on a hen weekend to Budapest, reminding me again how beautiful the rest of Europe is compared to the UK.

The problem is, the more you travel, the more you realise that where you are right now isn’t so great. I’ve always been amazed that England is so different from the rest of Europe - a half hour plane ride and you get amazing culture, pavement cafes and restaurants open late at night so you can go out at 10pm and sit talking with your friends into the early hours. Here we have yob culture, teenage mothers screaming at their kids and house prices that force people into homelessness.

Of course I’m pointing out the bad points. There are lots of lovely things about the UK and I’m sure it is a great place for a holiday. However living here for the past 27 years I think comparing the cost of living to the quality of life you get just doesn’t add up.

I’ve wanted to work abroad for a long time. Scandanavian Europe was my first love, particularly Norway and I can still see myself ending up there some day but not right now. There are still so many other places I want to see. I’ve been in my current job for nearly 4 years and although I enjoy it and I couldn’t ask for better colleagues, it’s really time for something new.  So after I’d returned from Thailand, a plan began to form in my head. Everyone I met there was on a trip of several months and I was on a 2 week holiday. It just wasn’t enough.

I decided I would leave my job in November of this year. This date was picked mainly because I had other commitments before then (a wedding, a trip to Japan that I’d already planned and a half marathon that I’d signed up for). Also I thought this would give me enough time to save up the money I needed to live on for a few months.

To maximise my savings I moved out of my little flat that I’d loved living in so much for a year and moved in with my brother. I thought about where I wanted to go once I left the UK. Canada was top of my list for a while - I fell in love with Vancouver when I visited several years ago and always wanted to work there. But for whatever reason, I soon decided on New Zealand instead. A working holiday visa was easily obtained and as I started to plan my trip, it morphed from flying straight to NZ to work, to travelling round NZ for a while before finding work, to travelling for as long as possible before I got to NZ. After all, when would I get another chance to do this? I’d decided to leave my job, was single and without a house or car to sell.

So my plan was formed. Originally I’d planned to start my trip in Tibet - a country I have wanted to visit forever. No sooner had I started planning itineraries around this, protests turned into violence in Lhasa and the borders have been closed to foreign visitors ever since. I am still devastated about this and hoping that things will return somewhat to normal after the olympic games in Beijing but only time will tell.

So my plan is as follows:

• Leave the UK in late October and join an intrepid group trip across India, into Nepal.
• Spend a week or so in Nepal, hopefully doing some hiking.
• Fly to Bangkok and hopefully meet up with a friend there for a few days.
• Spend a couple of months travelling round SE asia with a possible side trip to visit my friend in Beijing, if I can find a cheap enough flight.
• Fly to Bali for New Year (although I’m thinking I may end up having to put the date of this back a bit!)
• Fly to Cairns and travel down the east coast of Australia
• Fly from Sydney to Auckland, explore New Zealand for a while, depending on how much money I have left and find a job.
• I do not know how long I will be in New Zealand, although with any luck I will enjoy it, find a good job and extend my visa to 2 years; however I have the option of returning to the UK via the Cook Islands and the USA included in my ticket.

So that’s it! and this has been far too long for a first post. 119 days ’til I escape!